WELCOME

Welcome to my blog. If you live in Surrey and birding is your obsession (to get out of bed at some ridiculously early time of the morning, no matter what the weather, to go and look at birds isn't normal behaviour, believe me) and you're still a bit of a novice (like me) then, hopefully, this blog is for you.

Saturday, 31 July 2010

THE POINTLESS GULL SEARCH

With a bit of luck this will be my last weekend without a scope. It is my birthday next Saturday and my thoughtful wife, Annie, is hopefully going to purchase one for me at Sevenoaks Nature Reserve tomorrow afternoon.

Kay Opticals of Morden are demonstrating a number of their bins and scopes there tomorrow and we are planning a visit. A scope can't come quick enough, to be honest, because my birding is limited at the moment to woodland areas. Anywhere expansive like reservoirs and even places like my own patch, Holmethorpe Sand Pits, or Beddington Sewage Works, are pretty hopeless for viewing purposes with binoculars.

A case in point today. I don't know why I bothered going there, but the prospect of seeing a Caspian Gull was too tempting, even if it would be a massive outside chance of me actually seeing one in my current predicament. I was relying on the possibility that someone might be at Staines Reservoir actually looking at the bird when I got there, so that I could scrounge a look.

Predictably, there was not a soul around and anything that looked remotely interesting was too far away. There was a gull on the gantry on the King George VI Reservoir opposite where the Caspian Gull was supposed to be visible on, but it could have been a Herring Gull, or numerous other subtle variations from where I was looking.

Never mind, there were a few Common Terns flying around and I did get a photo of a Common Blue butterfly - just something to put up on the blog more than any other reason.

After a brief visit I drove to Little Bookham Common to try and get a half-decent photo of a Marsh Tit and a Bullfinch. No such luck there either. I saw both birds but couldn't get close enough quick enough to grab an image. So I took a photo of an impressive tree instead.